Sunday, December 13, 2009

Leading article: Despicable means to a dead end


The Independent

"What are we to make of Tony Blair's admission that he would have joined the invasion of Iraq even without evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and would, as he put it, have deployed another argument to justify the war to Parliament and the public?

He has, of course, inched before towards a confession that the war was really all about regime change, stupid. Never mind that this would have made it even less defensible on legal grounds......

Even by the standards of the former prime minister's chutzpah, this I'd-have-deployed-a-different-argument approach is extraordinary. What is worse than requiring us to view very differently the presentation of the "extensive, detailed and authoritative" WMD evidence – surely the most cynical con trick of modern times – is Mr Blair's sly reference to Islam, in which he moves on to another justification, fixing the decision to go to war in the context of a wider battle over religion: "I happen to think that there is a major struggle going on all over the world, really, which is about Islam and what is happening within Islam."

This is as fine an example of Mr Blair's intellectual dishonesty as it is possible to find......"

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